Trump fired the Democrat members of PCLOB on January 17, after having given them several days to voluntarily resign. The privacy board has indicated that its work is now at a standstill, and EU-US data transfers may be threatened going forward.
The EU-US data transfer decision at least grants a reprieve for big tech platforms that are built on targeted advertising such as Meta and Google, which are already under regulatory fire on multiple fronts.
EU data protection authorities are increasingly taking the position that the internal data that Google itself receives from the Google Analytics tool is in violation of GDPR terms. Sweden's data protection authority is indicating that it might be the next one in line to ban it.
The central objection raised is a predictable one, and one that some analysts believe will inevitably cause the EU-US data transfer proposal to fail yet another court challenge if it makes it to implementation: the lack of a federal-level data privacy law in the US.
The US proposal for a new EU-US data transfer framework that meets GDPR standards was drawn up in early 2022. The EDPB will now scrutinize the arrangement before passing it on to the EU member states and the European Parliament for final decisions.
The Biden Administration and the European Commission have taken steps toward establishing a new mechanism in support of cross-border data flows from the EU to the U.S., known as the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. Here are the next steps for organizations seeking to transfer EU personal data to the U.S.
The crux of the privacy objections is that the executive order does not guarantee that indiscriminate collection will be stopped; it merely attempts to narrow the scope of intelligence activity in EU-US data transfers.
As the bonds and the economic cooperation go deeper and deeper, there are many avenues and initiatives for cooperation and discussion. EU-US privacy alignment in the immediate future is not only possible but de facto inevitable.
Italy’s data protection authority has ruled that Google's data transfers to servers in the United States fall afoul of the rules of the GDPR, with the company not anonymizing IP addresses sufficiently.
Meta has issued statements indicating that a stoppage of EU-US data transfers would be "devastating" and could cause it to pull services from the region, even specifically naming Facebook and Instagram as products that could become inaccessible.
